


A Bit Much

by TheGreatLibraryFangirl (Mazeem)



Series: Kink and Bone [3]
Category: The Great Library Series - Rachel Caine
Genre: Ace Spectrum, Allonormativity, Asexuality Spectrum, Demisexuality, Female Friendship, Gen, Greysexuality, Look Khalila and I haven't figured out her label yet, Questioning character, Sexual Attraction, mention of masturbation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-05-16
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:20:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23915221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mazeem/pseuds/TheGreatLibraryFangirl
Summary: One evening early in their Castle Raby, Khalila asks Morgan for help understanding her relationship with Dario.
Relationships: Khalila Seif & Morgan Hault
Series: Kink and Bone [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1444414
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Volume Two - May Event for The Great Library





	A Bit Much

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [EmLeeKoe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmLeeKoe/pseuds/EmLeeKoe/) for reading this through for me!
> 
> This is technically set in Castle Raby, though you can barely tell lol, so I've added it to our May prompt collection.

Morgan perched a little awkwardly on the other side of Khalila's bed. She still had the napkin that Khalila had slipped her during dinner that evening. 

_Are you free to talk about something personal?_

So, here she was.

Khalila had removed her headscarf, and her hair fell straight down her back. There was a pin still stuck in it, forgotten about.

"Your hair is really pretty," Morgan said, then froze. Shit. Was that ... allowed? To comment on what was usually hidden? Fuck, had she just done the equivalent of commenting on Khalila's boobs? She'd never met a Muslim woman before she'd met Khalila. She'd only ever spoken with Khalila in communal areas of Ptolemy House, and there had been no time in Philadelphia for the two girls of the group to just ... sit in the same space together. 

"Thank you!" Khalila smiled, looking unperturbed. "I like yours. I wish mine curled."

Morgan scoffed. "It's constantly a mess. Yours looks so smooth, even though you've had it up all day." 

Khalila dragged her fingers through her hair until they snagged, then held the almost invisible mat out towards Morgan with a comically exaggerated look of frustration. Morgan couldn't help but laugh. 

"All right. Point made. Long hair is the bane of our existence." She relaxed into her seating position on the bed. "So what's the matter? I thought it would be a period thing, but I think you'd have got to the point before now."

"Oh. No, I've still got at least a week. Maybe two." Khalila picked up a hairbrush and started brushing her hair. "Are you all right in that regard?"

"Fine, yes."

Khalila's concern was sweet - they had discussed their awful periods before - but it was also pretty obviously dodging Morgan's question. 

(As it happened, Morgan had been due on for four days, and she was terribly afraid that the lack was somehow connected to the new direction her powers had taken, but she couldn't exactly share that, could she?)

"Come on, Khalila, spit it out."

Khalila glanced away, and Morgan experienced a fluttering of misgiving for her tone. What if Khalila wanted to cry about her family, and didn't feel she could do it around the boys? God knew, they all agreed she desperately needed to let some of that out. 

Khalila took a deep breath. "Dario says that he thinks you and Jess are sleeping together."

Morgan's brain stalled and restarted again. 

"Oh, _does_ he?" Morgan remembered that recent night where Dario had interrupted her and Jess in the library. Remembered fury rose in her like dark heat, and to her utmost horror she found her quintessence awareness springing hungrily to life in response. 

She shoved it back down again, and tried to keep her breathing steady. She'd promised Jess that she could control this.

When she raised her head from glaring at the bedspread, she found with alarm that Khalila was watching her intently. Even hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked from her own terrible concerns, Khalila was far too intuitive for Morgan's comfort. She scrabbled back to the conversation:

"Dario prevented that from happening, actually. But I'm sure he likes the thought." That last angry sentence fell from her lips before she quite remembered who she was speaking to. 

_Well done, Morgan! You just insinuated that Dario finds you attractive enough to wank to, to his girlfriend!_

Her entire body flushed head to toe with heat and she knew she must be blushing scarlet. 

But Khalila was smiling and rolling her eyes instead of acting offended. "I'm sure he does." She clasped her hands in front of her, a quirk that Morgan knew from postulancy was Khalila trying to refocus herself. "So, you're not, then?"

Morgan opened her mouth and no sound came out. Were she and Khalila using even vaguely the same definition of sleeping together? Why the hell were they even having this conversation?

"Why?" she managed, at last. "I thought you and Dario weren't."

Khalila smirked. It was definitely a smirk. "We're not. We had a long conversation a few months ago where he earnestly tried to find the loopholes and only shut up when I told him he was insulting me." She tucked her hair behind her ears and took a quick breath in. "But I didn't want to, then."

Morgan pondered this. She supposed Dario might get more appealing as time went by. Like ... cheddar cheese? Ok, bad analogy.

"And now you do," she said, neutrally. Khalila nodded. The tips of her ears were red. When she didn't respond, Morgan tried to forge ahead. "So ... are you ... going to?"

"Oh! No, definitely not." Khalila bristled up. 

Morgan felt bad for offending her, then squashed that. What, exactly, was she supposed to think? This was a strange conversation. 

"So ..." She trailed off expectantly and waved her hands around.

"So." Khalila clasped her hands even more tightly on her lap. "It's very distracting. I was just wondering how you coped with the ... the switch."

"The what?" Now Morgan was officially at sea. (Not literally. God, she'd love to be back at sea, feeling free and powerful and safe, rather than stuck in yet another perfumed cage.)

"You know. When you started wanting to sleep with Jess." Khalila's ears were very red, now. 

Morgan blinked. "Wait. Are you really saying that at the start you didn't find Dario sexually appealing _at all_? And then, suddenly now you do?"

"You wanted Jess like that _immediately_?" Khalila's voice was equally as shocked. 

"Well. I noticed him like that immediately, yes. You know? When you just look at someone and note that they're the type you find attractive?" 

Khalila made a strange face and stared at her hands. Her shoulders hunched.

"No? Not that, for you?" Morgan blundered on, feeling rather like she'd stumbled into some sort of landslide-prone trap. "I suppose that makes sense? If you know you won't have sex with someone before marriage, there's no point in noticing them."

Khalila shook her head. "It's not that. I've heard my cousins say things like that, before. Arguing about whether arms are a ... sexier ... feature than ... shoulders, or legs, or ..." She threw her hands up with a helpless air. "I've never particularly noticed these things in such general terms."

Morgan frowned. "What's Dario's sexiest feature, then?"

Khalila ducked away and giggled. "Morgan." 

A nasty part of Morgan rolled her eyes at the frivolity of this conversation, but then she remembered with a stab of guilt what must usually be occupying Khalila's thoughts. This was surely a welcome relief. 

"Khalila," she replied teasingly. 

"His bottom," Khalila said immediately. "Or maybe his mouth."

Well. Definitely the answer of someone who'd been thinking about it. That put to rest Morgan's suspicions that Khalila wasn't actually attracted to Dario at all and was confusing it with something else.

(Which was the sensible option, to be honest. He was attractive, but ... just no.)

She'd heard of people who didn't have any sexual attraction at all. This didn't sound like that, either. 

Hm. 

"Is Dario the first person you've ever thought about having sex with? Like, ever?"

Khalila sighed. "Yes, but that makes me sound so stupid! Like in romance novels, all 'knowing he's the one', and 'making me feel things I never felt before.' I'm more sensible than that," she said, like she was trying to convince herself. "I know he's not my soulmate. I know there's no such thing. But I do have ... all sorts of feelings for him, and it's a bit ... much." 

She pulled the brush back through her hair and turned away from Morgan, so that her face was obscured by her curtain of hair. "I thought Jess was your first, too. But, it's fine. Sorry. Thank you for listening to me, anyway."

Morgan felt like she'd fucked this up, but she knew a dismissal when she saw it. She stood up, and fumbled for something to say.

"Just because our experiences don't match doesn't mean you should feel stupid about yours."

Khalila made a vague acknowledging sound. 

"And anyway." Morgan sighed. In for a penny, in for a pound. "You asked how I dealt with wanting to have sex with Jess, while not, actually, having sex with Jess. The answer to that is masturbation."

Khalila winced, but swept her hair back over her shoulder so that Morgan could see her face again. "I thought it might be." She smiled a very fake smile up at Morgan and made shooing gestures. "Don't worry. I think this is awkward enough already, isn't it?"

Morgan had approximately twelve thousand questions on the tip of her tongue, but all of them felt rude given Khalila's clear embarrassment. Yet, she also didn't want to leave. She and Khalila could both do with more distractions from their dark worries - if not any more sex talk.

"Chess?" she blurted, before she could change her mind. "We've not played yet." Khalila's hand stilled on her hairbrush, and Morgan threw her ace: "I beat Jess the other day."

Khalila looked sharply at her, eyes lighting up, and nodded.

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, the problems of writing about sexuality in a setting where we can't use our words for it!! This was written purely to make it more obvious than it currently is in my Kink and Bone series that Khalila is **demisexual** , but frankly whatever you take away from it is great.


End file.
